DiGennaro Family

Start up the old gas-guzzling pick-up, grab the chain saw! We’re out to reduce global warming! My neighbor has a 40+ acre wood lot next to us. He harvested the mature hardwood and the tops are still lying out there – plenty of firewood for you and me both.

In about an hour, and driving less than a mile, the guys and I can bring back a truckload of red and white oak – over 12 million BTU’s worth and enough to heat the house for up to a week.

The calculus: 0.1 gallon of gasoline for the pickup, at 12,400 BTU, about 0.2 gallon gas/oil mixture for the chainsaw = 24,800 BTU consumed. Spending an additional 0.8 watts for 168 hours (per week) for the water circulation pumps with 3413 BTU per kWh (which = about 500 BTU) brings the BTU cost for a week of heating to 37,700, say 40,000 BTU. With a modest 50% efficiency burn (it’s probably better than that), we’ve used that 40,000 BTU expenditure from fossil fuel sources to deliver 6,000,000 BTU to the house. That’s a fossil fuel multiplier of 150.

So what about the carbon dioxide emissions from the wood being burned? Trees are solar batteries capturing CO₂ from the air and storing it in cellulose. They incidentally release the O₂ which we kind of need for breathing. When they are cut down, the usable timber, with its accompanying carbon, is stored for decades in furniture and houses. This takes that carbon temporarily out of the cycle.

The unused part of the tree just decomposes, with the respiration of the saprophytes (I love big words!) recombining the same amount of O₂ released by the solar energy storage from the trees’ photosynthesis with the carbon in the wood, netting a zero CO₂ gain for the atmosphere, with some of that postponed as long as the houses with the hardwood floors and couches stand. So burning the waste wood in our wood furnace just speeds the release of the same CO₂ which would have returned to the atmosphere anyway as the tree rotted. The energy now available to heat my house, by the way, is some portion of the sunshine stored as the trees made cellulose. A solar-heated house!

So, if you live in an economically depressed carbon-rich area like us, heat with wood, and save the planet. All of this doesn’t even touch on the physical benefits from working up a load of wood. Maybe I’ll act the pedant on that some other time. I gotta go load the wood stove.